American Economic Association A Sociological Perspective on Gender and Career Outcomes Author(s): Barbara F. Reskin and Denise D. Bielby Source: The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter, 2005), pp. 71-86 Published by: American Economic Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4134993 Accessed: 10/01/2009 17:54 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aea. 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Men are more likely than women to partic- ipate in the labor force, and men average more hours of paid labor per week and more weeks per year. Women and men tend to hold different occupa- tions and to work in different industries, firms and jobs. Furthermore, men outearn women, hold more complex jobs and are more likely to supervise workers of the other sex and to dominate the top positions in their organization. The challenge for both disciplines lies not in showing that gender is linked to employment outcomes, but in explaining the associations. Economists have sought explanations in the characteristics and preferences of individual workersor employers. Some have attributed the associations between workers' sex and their career outcomes to sex differences in training and experience, career commitment or competing demands on time and energy. Others focus on employers' preferences for workers of one sex over the other ("taste discrimination") or on employers' beliefs that workers of one sex or the other are more costly or less profitable to employ ("statistical discrimination"). The sociological approach differs from that of economists in recognizing sex segregation as a causal mechanism that gives rise to other differences between women's and men's careers. This emphasis on segregation reflects sociologists' interest in the ramifications of societal-level systems of differentiationand stratifica- tion. It stems also from the discipline's concern with the impact of people's location in social structures on a variety of life outcomes. By concentrating men and women in different jobs, segregation exposes them to more or less similar employment SBarbaraF. Reskinis S. FrankMiyamoto Professor of Sociology,University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.Denise D. Bielby is Professorof Sociology,University of California at Santa Barbara,Santa Barbara, California. 72 Journal of EconomicPerspectives practices and reward systems that can, in turn, exacerbate or moderate sex differ- ences in other work outcomes.1 Sex Differentiation and Sex Stratification Social differentiationrefers to the social processes that mark certain personal characteristics as important. We differentiate people by their birth cohorts (baby boomers, "generation Xers"), the vehicles they drive, their favorite music, whether they are "cat people" or "dog people," their marital status, sexual preference and many other traits. The practice of social differentiation is ubiquitous. Indeed, cognitive psychologists agree that the impulse to categorize others appears to originate in automatic cognitive processes that free up mental resources for other purposes (Brewer and Liu, 1989). Sex and age are treated as relevant in assigning roles and responsibilities in multiple spheres. These characteristics are "master statuses," central in the organi- zation of social and economic life. Societies reinforce and even exaggerate the differences that define group membership in master statuses through sumptuary and behavioral rules. For example, in feudal societies in which people's status as peasants or landholders shaped their whole lives, class membership was distin- guished in all realms of life, including dress, prescribed activities and legal rights. Although social differentiation does not inevitably lead to unequal treatment for members of different categories, differentiation is a necessary precursor for social stratification-systematic inequality in the distribution of socially valued re- sources on the basis of people's personal characteristics. Stratification is consequen- tial for the lives of individuals to the extent that the same characteristic arrays groups in the same order across many domains. All societies use sex (as well as age) to stratify their members across virtually all domains (Huber, 1999, p. 66; Collins et al., 1993). In contrast, most characteristics (for example, religious affiliation or scholarly discipline) are linked to unequal rewards in just a few domains. Thus, sex differences and stratification are fundamental social processes. The degree of sex differentiation in an organization or society is positively related to the amount of sex stratification, according to a synthetic model based on diverse empirical evidence (Collins et al., 1993).2 Pervasive sex differentiation 1A body of economic research has investigated the earnings gap between the sexes; for a summary in thisjournal, see Blau and Kahn (2000). Since our focus in this article is on the sociological research and on the impact of structural location in the workplace on economic outcomes, we do not discuss the earnings gap here. However, it is worth noting that in 1999, the gross earnings ratio for women and men employed full-time was .72, unadjusted for other factors (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2003). 2As Collins et al. (1993, p. 186) explain, empirical evidence underlying sociological generalizations often take a variety of forms, including ethnographic research, interviews, historical and documentary analysis, as well as standard quantitative analyses. The diverse types of evidence on which sociological generalizations are based-perhaps especially true in the area of gender stratification-is another difference between sociological and economic approaches to gender and careers. BarbaraF. Reskin and Denise D. Bielby 73 signals that people's sex is always relevant. Also, belief systems thatjustify pervasive sex differentiation simultaneously legitimate sex stratification. These belief systems hold that males are more valuable than females and that customarily male activities are more worthwhile than customarily female activities (Ridgeway and Smith-Lovin, 1999; Cohen and Huffman, 2003). Although the extent of sex stratification varies, comparative historical research indicates that no societies accord advantage to women over men; most accord advantage to men across multiple indicia of social and economic well-being (Huber, 1999; Tilly, 1998). In the United States today, predominantly male lines of work display the most sex inequality. Sex Differentiation and the Sexual Division of Labor All societies categorize their members by their sex. From individuals' biological sex, we infer personality traits, preferences and potential. These sex based infer- ences are sex stereotypes. Stereotypes matter because they are generally known and prescribe appropriate behavior. Moreover, all societies exaggerate biological dif- ferences between the sexes by prescribing different dress, comportment and tastes. As a result, in a face-to-face interaction, we are rarely in doubt regarding the other person's sex. By overstating biological sex differences, sex differentiation lends legitimacy to women's and men's concentration in different activities (Padavic and Reskin, 2002). A primary manifestation of sex differentiation in activities is the sexual division of labor. In the broadest sense, men specialize in and are primarily responsible for market work, and women specialize in and are primarily responsible for domestic work. Within market work, a sexual division of labor also exists that distributes the sexes differently across work settings and assigns to them different tasks. Sociolo- gists refer to this sexual division of labor in market work as sex segregation. By the end of the twentieth century, the legal underpinnings of the sexual division of labor had eroded. The courts invalidated the so-called "protective"labor laws barring women from some lines of work and some working conditions, and the sex-neutral Family Medical Leave Act of 1993 recognized that male as well as female workers shared responsibility for babies and sick